Unified human and robot command for disaster recovery situations

The system described herein was designed to allow sending commands to and obtaining location data from humans in a manner similar to robots, thus simplifying the command of combined human/robot teams. We designed and implemented a system that allows humans to be interfaced with a robot framework (ROS, or Robot Operating System), providing sensor information and waypoint based navigation for a team of people. An experiment is also described in which participants were asked to drive a team of units, first described as all robots, then described as both robots and humans. We discovered that participants have a similar level of success when using such a system to control units described as robots as when they use it to control units described as both humans and robots.